How to handle raytracing discussion while it's platform specific to nVidia

Veteran

Company shills and fanboys from the PC GPU side that cant handle the least bit accurate information that paints their beloved company in a less than perfect rosey light, so what we're left with is marketting material fodder that is exactly their company line.

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More like the other way actually, anti x company spreading fud and misinformation about a tech they barely understand, half the arguments about RT have been proven wrong, and most of the other half are just conjectures. It's becoming a pain in the ass to even have a civilized conversation about it.

Ever since RT has been announced we have been dealing with this on a daily basis, from people shrugging it off as an "only" denoising solution, to people calling it an NVIDIA scam, to people doubting the thing before they even see a working game, to people hating the tech because it's from NVIDIA or because it's a black box, to people doing meaningless comparisons of RT to VR, to people stating premature conclusions before any proper image investigation has been made, to moderators calling people shills (which is against the rules) and calling RT a virus and all the manner of illogical BS ever conceived in a tech forum. You can pretty much name the people (including the moderators) who will like a certain post before it's even posted.

Wanna know why this has become a touchy subject? it's because most contributors to the discussion have been tainted by their already biased opinions, BEFORE they know well about the tech or the possibilities, that any attempt of shaking off their taint comes off as dishonest and fake, especially when the grounds of their criticism is as shaky as an earthquake.

I would appreciate it if we tone down the trash talk, like massively tone it down, because as I listed it, the other side of the debate fared far more worse.

ModeratorLegend

The RTX discussion is a serious problem. Discussing this new rendering tech is exactly what B3D is supposed to be about, but all discussion around RTX degenerates into noise. On the one side, fans of the tech see any critical discussion as prejudiced anti-nVidia bias and call it out. On the other side, people who just want to talk about the tech end up talking about those on the pro-RTX side constantly saturating discussion with complaints.

It's the kind of fanboy nonsense we endured in the console forum but have largely got past, not least because of some strong purging of highly partisan members. As a moderator who sees inline advice on managing discussions isn't being adhered to because the posters see me as partisan, I'm not sure what course of action I am to take. Either I (and the mod team) don't get involved and the discussion is doomed until AMD introduce raytracing tech, or we ban RTX discussion until AMD have something, or I get hard core and start banning members, to purge out the noise.

There is one very essential point to understand here, targeted at DavidGraham and all those who agree with him...

Ever since RT has been announced we have been dealing with this on a daily basis, from people shrugging it off as an "only" denoising solution, to people calling it an NVIDIA scam, to people doubting the thing before they even see a working game, to people hating the tech because it's from NVIDIA or because it's a black box, to people doing meaningless comparisons of RT to VR, to people stating premature conclusions before any proper image investigation has been made...

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None of that is disallowed. It's the basis of discussion and free thinking. People are allowed to hate or love RTX because it's from nVidia, and they're allowed to jump to conclusions, and they're allowed to be wrong. This is all in the B3D FAQ and, if you are going to get annoyed at BRiT violating the rules, you should recognise all the against-the-rules complaints about posts that precipitated that. If everyone stuck to the rules and the principles of B3D, rule-breaking wouldn't escalate and discussions wouldn't degnerate as they constantly do. Counter wrong opinions with good arguments and solid evidence; not complaints about prejudice.

It's also worth noting that emotions are really colouring perceptions. You mention "people stating premature conclusions before any proper image investigation has been made..." which is clearly aimed at me, but I went into detail on four points that you claimed were jumping to conclusions explaining how they weren't and you misinterpreted them - you didn't even acknowledge my explanations and admit to the misunderstanding. There's no civil, "oh, my bad. I see now you weren't jumping to conclusions." In fact you've just carried that belief over into this complaint post because that emotional energy is still with you, and it's such emotions that cause BRiT's frustrations to be slapped down in response to remarks from a constant noise generator why such noise is generating emotions.

The only thing that matters here on B3D is that the discussion is intelligent. It's allowed to be wrong. The next step forward has to be about enabling RT discussion and stopping all this fractious fallout. As a mod, I hope I've been clear in requesting technical discussion. eg. In the BFV reflection tech thread, vipa899 posted an obvious, irrelevant, non-technical post, to which I replied he's free to post 'pro RT visuals' posts in other threads where it's appropriate, but to keep the technical discussions technical. As such, I'm thinking at least a hard-core control of raytracing threads in the technical fora (Console Tech, Rendering Tech and APIs), where any and every non-technical post results in bans (reply or temp depending on persistence of poster). That would mean posting, "it's the first game to use RTX so we should expect some artefacts," will result in a reply ban, as would, "why are you posting that when we already know it?" There would have to be one warning for those who don't get this message, to be explicitly told of the stronger stance.

That's the only course of action I see as appropriate and actionable, but this thread is here to hear other suggestions.

Veteran

On the other side, people who just want to talk about the tech end up talking about those on the pro-RTX side constantly saturating discussion with complaints.

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No that's not what happens at all, it's people criticizing the tech who always go on the defensive, it always goes like this: a member posts news, video, story about RT, some other member criticizes certain points, the first member replies, then the second member can't handle it and accuses the first of adding noise or interfering into the discussion. The complaints almost always stems from the second member side.

You mention "people stating premature conclusions before any proper image investigation has been made..." which is clearly aimed at me,

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No it isn't aimed at you, because at least you provided some evidence to your claims, others however didn't bother. What I criticized in your theory is the jumping to conclusions before doing more scrutinized comparisons. A concern that is resolved through going into more comparisons. No problem here.

it's such emotions that cause BRiT's frustrations to be slapped down in response to remarks from a constant noise generator why such noise is generating emotions.

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Moderators SHOULD NOT express frustration in this way, because it colors them prejudiced and unjust. If you feel frustrated take action. Don't violate the rules and then ask others to respect them, because they won't.

As a mod, I hope I've been clear in requesting technical discussion. eg. In the BFV reflection tech thread, vipa899 posted an obvious, irrelevant, non-technical post, to which I replied he's free to post 'pro RT visuals' posts in other threads where it's appropriate,

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You are within your rights to take such action. But resorting to naming calling and violating the rules is not the best course of action.

Where is the technical discussion in name calling and categorizing people? A mod is the role model in maintaining the peace of the discussions, once you break it don't expect others to let it slide. Is the job of the mod now to seed more noise into the discussion?

That would mean posting, "it's the first game to use RTX so we should expect some artefacts," will result in a reply ban, as would, "why are you posting that when we already know it?" There would have to be one warning for those who don't get this message, to be explicitly told of the stronger stance.

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What you need to do is keep moderators from getting involved in the discussion in a personal way, their job is to organize the flow of information and to keep the peace, not to stir things up. That alone will help things a great deal, the rest can be resolved through the current methods just fine.

RegularNewcomer

to people hating the tech because it's from NVIDIA or because it's a black box

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I guess it's me who brought this term up.
Requesting more openness is a good thing that needs to be done. It took a decade of whining to make something like AZDO possible in OpenGL. Better start early. This does NOT make me an NV hater. (I would do the some if a had a leather jacket - just i have none.)
I swallow the pill to be the 'RT or NV hater' in hope some people will join requesting to open things up quickly.

In practice: Considering the complexity of efficient ray batching it is very likely they implement this with compute under the hood not fixed function. This means it would be possible to orchestrate RT within flexible GPGPU, and that's what i want to be exposed, plus the fine grained work sheduling stuff. Give it to me!
If i am wrong and they have no complex batching at all, then i still want those things, even more of course.

The discussion is indeed very hard. It's hard to stay on topic with so many RTX threads, it's very hard not to get mistaken as pro or con, it's hard to avoid wrong speculations because we know nothing about how the underlying HW works. But a heated discussion is much better than none and it's fruitful i would say.

ModeratorLegend

No that's not what happens at all, it's people criticizing the tech who always go on the defensive, it always goes like this: a member posts news, video, story about RT, some other member criticizes certain points, the first member replies, then the second member can't handle it and accuses the first of adding noise or interfering into the discussion. The complaints almost always stems from the second member side.

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I can't vouch for conversations I haven't been a part of, but in every one that I have, every critique of RTX has been met first and foremost with requests not to talk about RTX because its early days.

The BFV reflection thread shows your discussion structure theories are not true. There was a degree of discussion for the first page, although counterpoints weren't at all in depth and people were content to just use one-liners. It was vipa899 who started mindless trumpeting RTX without engaging in the discussion of the tech points. I then raised that even though it's early days, it's worth discussing, which led you to comment about it being embarrassing to be wrong, and scott-arm saying it's early days and conclusions shouldn't be drawn (when no-one was drawing conclusions), and vipa again saying RTX is the bestest. By that point I'm getting annoyed because it's the same thing with people derailing tech RTX tech threads, then vipa claims it's all agendas which gets my goat, which then led to this post airing frustrations about people closing down conversation on what RTX gets wrong. You then post you hate people jumping to grand conclusions, which AFAICS isn't happening, and I even went at length to explain how I wasn't jumping to conclusions and you were reading agenda into it.

I know none of that is disallowed, however what isn't allowed is the emotional break down of categorizing people as shills when they are responding to this barrage of misinformation.

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It's not misinformation! It's theories and ideas.

Moderators SHOULD NOT express frustration in this way, because it colors them prejudiced and unjust. If you feel frustrated take action. Don't violate the rules and then ask others to respect them, because they won't.

You are within your rights to take such action. But resorting to naming calling and violating the rules is not the best course of action.

Where is the technical discussion in name calling and categorizing people? A mod is the role model in maintaining the peace of the discussions, once you break it don't expect others to let it slide. Is the job of the mod now to seed more noise into the discussion?

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That's true, but an outcome of the wider problem.

What you need to do is keep moderators from getting involved in the discussion in a personal way, their job is to organize the flow of information and to keep the peace, not to stir things up. That alone will help things a great deal, the rest can be resolved through the current methods just fine.

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that's not at all helpful. You've focussed entirely on BRiT calling unnamed members shills without thinking about the problem this thread is tackling. If the mods were to reply ban members that they considered derailing topics out of fanishness, they'd be accused of controlling the conversation. But trying to steer conversation without the tools to do it leads to frustration coming out into the posts.

As I see it, pro RTX members are perceiving people's ideas of RTX as being misinformation, and are annoyed at it being spread which colours the conversation from the off. It needs a reboot somehow to allow the ideas to be conversed without it becoming 'them and us'.

One definite course of action from reviewing the thread though is the necessary exclusion of @vipa899 from threads about RTX. His posts are clear tipping points.

VeteranRegular

Moderators SHOULD NOT express frustration in this way, because it colors them prejudiced and unjust. If you feel frustrated take action. Don't violate the rules and then ask others to respect them, because they won't.

Where is the technical discussion in name calling and categorizing people? A mod is the role model in maintaining the peace of the discussions, once you break it don't expect others to let it slide. Is the job of the mod now to seed more noise into the discussion?

What you need to do is keep moderators from getting involved in the discussion in a personal way, their job is to organize the flow of information and to keep the peace, not to stir things up. That alone will help things a great deal, the rest can be resolved through the current methods just fine.

VeteranRegular

Why alternatives are better to my mind is that they are more meritocratic allowing similar minded people e.g. developers to form tight circles and the noise is a lot less. That gives those who really contribute much better chance at dialogue with peers instead of discussions becoming trolling wars for the sake of monetized clicks or fanboyism. It also allows for regular folks like me to get a dense package of information without all the bullshit in between. Also knowing who writes gives much more credibility behind some of the statements as it's much easier to trust people who developed the damn thing(be it games or hw or API's) instead of anonymous people guessing what was done and what might be the potential issues.

RegularNewcomer

Either I (and the mod team) don't get involved and the discussion is doomed until AMD introduce raytracing tech, or we ban RTX discussion until AMD have something, or I get hard core and start banning members, to purge out the noise.

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This seems very..... i dont understand why it is so important AMD has RT on their gpu line? They will have it, consoles probally wont in 2020, is it that what the problem is?

One thing i wonder is why ppl outside of this forum having the perception b3d is mostly console, i posted about DF mentioning gow, spiderman, hzd lacking in just reflections, that RT could help out greatly there, i mean artwork alone wont perhaps be enough, that post wasnt liked very well because i mentioned a limitation of hardware without such tech.

I do think mods are nice otherwise, they just have their preferences. Calling out names and bad mouthing, yes it shouldnt occur, its wrong but they are people too, emotions.

Im told not to post about RT in the tech forums so i wont, their ship their rules.

Just to say, im not an nvidia fanboy or work for them, i do like nvidia but dont agree on pricing. Im on the pc side of things cause there is where tech moves and evolves the fastest. Just like the mods are on the console side of things.
I do have many consoles and a ps4 just for the exclusives, which i would get on pc if possible.

Im glad DF does have a pc guy who reviews tech on pc, i think both worlds need to be accepted sometime, just console gets abit.... monotized?

ModeratorLegendAlphaSubscriber

This does not come from just this month in the raytracing discussion but from years of observations and reports from numerous topics.

@DavidGraham and @pharma , your obsessions with Nvidia have blinded you to the reality that your posting styles are hostile to open discussions on technology that do not parrot the company marketting materials. The only way forward for the benefit of the site is you both learn to deal with your biases.

VeteranRegular

Well, funny thing is I came here for the pc discussion originally, I stayed for the consoles. Nowday I'm mostly interested in vr/ar and ignore other stuff. If I wasn't big fan of VR I would probably not come here anymore, anything to spread the word about the good vr experiences and warn about the bad ones.

If I want to see technical discussions I peak in twitter or watch some of the gdc, siggraph, various keynotes like CES,E3 etc. presentations from youtube. I much rather believe the developer presenting their work than a noname person in internet forum putting them down.

Well, funny thing is I came here for the pc discussion originally, I stayed for the consoles

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Same here, its the only way forward here, dont know what happened but i remember pc being in a better position many years ago. Why this is just a trend on b3d, no idea. One thing is sure though, the mods preferred platform is a console. With that im not claiming bias or fanboy, just stating the obvious.

Just typing 'b3d' in google nets you 'console technology' as a first hit.
People see this board as a console one.
Thinkoff linus tech tips being mostly console, would be abit strange, where hw doesnt change for 7 years and abit of guessing what the future will bring, anything else isnt intresting or tailored. Exciting

LegendRegularSubscriber

Aha didnt know that, ivent even been here that long i think, atleast not actively. Care to share what that was about?

Same here, its the only way forward here, dont know what happened but i remember pc being in a better position many years ago. Why this is just a trend on b3d, no idea. One thing is sure though, the mods preferred platform is a console. With that im not claiming bias or fanboy, just stating the obvious.

Just typing 'b3d' in google nets you 'console technology' as a first hit.
People see this board as a console one.
Thinkoff linus tech tips being mostly console, would be abit strange, where hw doesnt change for 7 years and abit of guessing what the future will bring, anything else isnt intresting or tailored. Exciting

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the console section is more active in the tech talk than other forums, where the PC section has competition from other tech based sites. I think this is natural.

LegendRegularSubscriber

Ok, why is that natural? Or do you mean that since consoles generally dont see much tech talk on anything but b3d, there shouldnt be too much pc here?

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no, that most people wanting to talk tech on consoles, this forum does it better than the competing forums.
Whereas the PC forums have significant competition against other forums, so the traffic is a bit more split up.
Thus is natural to see the console forums here become over time fairly popular. Where else would you go to seriously discuss console tech?

VeteranRegular

One thing that I remember being different in past and it might just be I remember wrong. Beyond3d as a forum used to be enthusiastic about new technology. I suppose some old timers have seen so many new things come and fail that it's difficult to be enthusiastic. This then reflects on discussions which could be perceived as negativity whereas it's most likely coming from voice of experience and realism. This could also be part of people getting older and grumpier,...

This can be frustrating/off putting to those individuals who still have that spark of enthusiasm left. I feel this a lot when I look at discussions about VR. It's not going much anywhere at the moment but I'm still enthusiastic and hopeful about it. Realism sometimes feels like negativity even though most people don't mean criticism as an attack against the technology. Or it just could be some folks play devils advocate in order to try to create more discussion and keep the forum somehow alive. I guess everyone can choose their own belief.

RegularNewcomer

no, that most people wanting to talk tech on consoles, this forum does it better than the competing forums.
Whereas the PC forums have significant competition against other forums, so the traffic is a bit more split up.
Thus is natural to see the console forums here become over time fairly popular. Where else would you go to seriously discuss console tech?

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Yes but thats exactly what i ment.
Forum automaticly becomes console and is being tailored to that. I do understand now that i shouldnt be talking pc at all, keeping that to all other forums. For console il come here. Makes sense in the end.

Frankly your post would have been enough for me to refrain from the whole RT thing as i understand now where the problem lies.

Veteran

then vipa claims it's all agendas which gets my goat, which then led to this post airing frustrations about people closing down conversation on what RTX gets wrong. You then post you hate people jumping to grand conclusions, which AFAICS isn't happening, and I even went at length to explain how I wasn't jumping to conclusions and you were reading agenda into it.

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See my point? It's almost always the second side complaining, your post initiated waves of out of topic posts, if you simply committed to only discussion, or took moderating action, like removing out of topic posts or editing them, none of this would have happened. It's not the job of the moderator to go on a rant.

In fact, you did that already, you spawned off a new thread to specifically talk about BFV tech. You also edited other people's posts. That was more than enough to thwart out of topic points. Ironically you left out of topic posts from moderators intact, de-emphasizing your actions and sending the wrong signals.

Whatever it is, it doesn't give anyone any excuse to break the rules, you say you encourage intelligent discussions yet you allow moderators to be running amok with no regard to the rules, this is hypocricy at it's finest.

your posting styles are hostile to open discussions on technology that do not parrot the company marketting materials. The only way forward for the benefit of the site is you both learn to deal with your biases.

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Guess what? The marketing material has been the most accurate so far against many not understood argument points, in fact this is the standard practice in any discussion related to certain technologies from AMD or NVIDIA, as this is your baseline and your number 1 source of info.

In fact, I always back up my points with data, tests, soruces and links, mostly from independent sources outside of NVIDIA's circle, and I only wish others would do the same.

Your posting style is also excessively anti NVIDIA specifically to the point that your likes can be found in any post that is anti NVIDIA before the point of the post is even validated. You also resort to naming calling despite being a mod. A behavior that you, yourself find unacceptable.

I don't mean this as a gesture of disrespect, but as a general observation from years of posting.

Wrong or right doesnt matter in the end, its their ship, their rules. They say blue is red then blue is red, not blue. People have no other choice then respect what the mods want, nothing else.
Mod tells me to refrain from talking about RT in the tech forums, then i refrain from that. Not refraining from that could result in a reply ban.

Im just very excited about ray tracing finally making it to actual AAA games, with the RTX 2060 arriving 15 jan 2019, i and many others might have access to RT in games.
I think that, if RT had been avaible in PS4 or PS5 and not Nvidia/PC, and i would praise it like i did for RTX2000 series, im sure mods wouldnt be so emotional about it.

Heck, B3D is the only tech forum where console reigns, its nothing to lay awake over you know. So many other forums, with devs giving their inputs.
Ive been reading B3D since 2003, a swedish tech site/forum frequently linking to B3D, this has slowly died out as people there see B3D as a console forum.

ModeratorLegend

...if you simply committed to only discussion, or took moderating action, like removing out of topic posts or editing them, none of this would have happened. It's not the job of the moderator to go on a rant.

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That's true in principle, except if I removed the posts I considered noise, I'd be accused of being biased and generating wider issues across the board. There isn't a clear rule-base for managing the discussion, leaving contributors (I post in the capacity of forum member and not moderator in such cases where moderation is uncertain) to post their POVs on what should and shouldn't be allowed. I am quite sure that if you were a moderator handling these discussions according to your values, you'd remove a completely different set of posts to the ones I'd consider removing. Hence it needs a clear policy that isn't defined by personal whims, which is the purpose of this thread.

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